Long term archival is successive short/middle term archival.
I think I read this quote on Tim Bray's blog[0], but I am not sure anymore. This is now my approach, my short/middle term archival is designed to be easily transferred to the next short/middle term store on a regular basis. I started with 500GB drives, now I am at 14TB.
My first hard drive was 5Mb, and I had to write my own driver for it (PDP11, c. 1982). It was a hell of a step up from 8" floppies, enough so I partitioned it into 8 separate areas.
Even the floppies were a step up from paper tape - the older guys used to have a cupboard of paper tapes on coathangers, and linked their code by feeding the tapes through the reader in the right order.
I think I read this quote on Tim Bray's blog[0], but I am not sure anymore. This is now my approach, my short/middle term archival is designed to be easily transferred to the next short/middle term store on a regular basis. I started with 500GB drives, now I am at 14TB.
[0]: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/